A Democratic Socialist Blog

Obamacare’s War on Seniors

There have been time I have contacted the Rep LoBiondo and told his aid that I would support the stand against Obamacare. First the Tax is Un-Constitutional no what the supreme court. I was just whacked with $97
fine. I want redress and compensation for that. Now the USA published that article on Obamacare and seniors, did the tell us this?
The Obama administration boasted that ObamaCare was improving health-care quality for seniors, and it pulled out a bag of statistical tricks to prove it. But a closer look shows that it’s not improving care. It’s skimping on it, socking seniors with unexpected bills for “observation care” and likely shortening their lives.
President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that fewer seniors discharged from the hospital are returning for additional care within a month’s time. HHS claims that this drop in “re-admissions,” from 18.5 percent in 2012 to 17.5 percent in 2013, signals quality improvement.
Nonsense. The 50 best hospitals according to US News World Report’s Best Hospitals annual rankings have above-average readmission rates.
Nationwide, re-admissions are dropping because Section 3025 of ObamaCare punishes hospitals if a senior returns within 30 days.
What happens to the senior treated for a heart attack who rushes to the hospital a week later feeling faint, possibly because of arrhythmia?
To dodge the penalty, hospitals put the patient under “observation.” It’s just a word on the chart. The patient may get the same tests and be put in the same room as if he had been admitted.
But unless he stays at least two nights, the hospital won’t bill Medicare for a stay, and the patient gets clobbered with the cost. Many seniors don’t even know they were under observation until they get the bill.
So much for HHS boasting about the drop in re-admissions. HHS officials fail to mention that this coincides with a rise in elderly patients placed under “observation status.” It’s a hospital billing trick, and a dirty one for seniors.
Penalizing re-admissions, which started in 2013, is one of the law’s tricks to reduce Medicare spending, never mind the impact on seniors. Cuts in future Medicare spending pay for more than half the law’s cost — robbing seniors to fund health-care coverage for other groups.

The research, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging found that heart-attack patients were 19 percent more likely to die at low-spending hospitals. Who would want those odds?
Over a four-year period, 13,613 seniors who died from pneumonia, stroke, heart attacks and other common conditions at California’s low-spending hospitals might have recovered and gone home had they been treated elsewhere. And that’s just in one state.
Ignoring this evidence, ObamaCare incentives, hospitals in all 50 states to imitate low-spending hospitals that are deadly for seniors. That’s some definition of value.
Individual Mandate Tax. Many seniors face a coverage gap between retirement and Medicare eligibility. Obamacare raises taxes on these younger seniors by punishing them if they don’t purchase “qualifying health insurance.” Set to go into effect in 2015, the excise tax penalty for mandate non-compliance will in 2016 rise to 2.5 percent of adjusted gross income for a senior couple (or $1,390 for those making less than $55,600). Why does Obamacare raise taxes on seniors just as they are entering retirement?
Medical device excise tax. Obamacare imposes a new excise tax on medical device manufacturers in 2013. These companies will surely build the cost of this new tax into the price of what they sell. Who buys medical devices? Who buys pacemakers, wheelchairs, and other costly medical devices? Seniors do. The war on Seniors, it looks like the Democrats trun to beat up on people.